and The Prompter. [Footnote: Les Plaideurs (Racine).]

There are also COMIC OBSESSIONS that seem to bear a great resemblance
to dream obsessions. Who has not had the experience of seeing the same
image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning
in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common.
Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage
or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to
a dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: it
persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each
time with a different meaning.

Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird
effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concession
extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a
more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached.
Now, this progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a very
peculiar sensation. Such is probably the experience of the tippler when
he feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in which
neither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him. Now, consider
whether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation:
for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almost
reasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities.
Consider also the Bourgeois gentilhomme, where the different characters
seem to allow themselves to be caught up in a very whirlwind of madness
as the play proceeds. "If it is possible to find a man more completely
mad, I will go and publish it in Rome." This sentence, which warns us
that the play is over, rouses us from the increasingly extravagant
dream into which, along with M. Jourdain, we have been sinking.

But, above all, there is a special madness that is peculiar to dreams.
There are certain special contradictions so natural to the imagination
of a dreamer, and so absurd to the reason of a man wide-awake, that it
would be impossible to give a full and correct idea of their nature to
anyone who had not experienced them. We allude to the strange fusion
that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only
one and yet remain distinct. Generally one of these is the dreamer
himself. He feels he has not ceased to be what he is; yet he has become
someone else. He is himself, and not himself. He hears himself speak